Sorting through a batch of records from the library. I never seem to
get around to jotting words down (tongue tied except for grades),
but let's give it a try here:

Louis Armstrong / King Oliver. This anthology, on
Milestone, combines the 1923 Creole Jazz Band recordings with the
1924 Red Onion Jazz Babies cuts, leading up to the famous "Cake
Walking Babies from Home." The King Oliver sessions always seemed
like an historic curiosity to me: one might mine them for hints,
but the real progression comes later, in the Hot Fives and Sevens.
A-

Branford Marsalis: Requiem. Having a hard time with this
one, perhaps a generic problem, since I always like his records, yet
always reluctant to push one above B+. Not a breakthrough so much as
an accident, the record left unfinished by Kenny Kirkland's death.
A-

A Modern Jazz Symposium of Music and Poetry with Charles
Mingus. Title doesn't sound promising, but the only spoken
stretch is a Mingus meditation on jazz, with asides on his landlord.
The music is early but classic Mingus, not as finely wrought as it
would be in the next few years. A-

Big bad weather day. We watch radar on TV, storms slipping north and
south of Wichita. Garden City gets hit pretty hard, 80mph winds, hail,
tornado scares, flash flooding. Forecast was for partly cloudy.
I stepped out around 3PM for a look at the skies: it was, indeed,
partly cloudy, but the cloudy part was an amazing mix of partly
formed thunderstorms, mixed in with patches of sun. Temperature
dropped ten degrees in the next twenty minutes. We decide to stay
in, watch basketball game: utterly boring, but almost half of the
time was taken up with interruptions for weather updates. At one
point there were severe thunderstorm warnings or tornado warnings
for something like 15 counties. Sedgwick had three separate
warnings.

I found a red snapper fillet in the freezer, so I
blackened it. Sauteed
a red onion and a yellow bell pepper, and made
roasted potatoes. Fabulous.

Got two new cats. Small females, 1-2 years old: one black with brilliant
onyx eyes, the other white with faint streaks of tan and blue eyes.
Debating names; they couldn't care less. Allergies kicked up something
nasty. I'm really bummed.

Movie: The Putz. Local talent, shot on video, monochrome
no less, a film much like its namesake hero: over-ambitious, too
self-conscious, clumsy, sweet, yet more often than not quite funny.
I could nitpick: some things work, some fall flat, but the movie is
brimming with ideas and characters.
A-

The clams recipe was scaled up, with shrimp, sea scallops, and a
couple of lobsters thrown in: a pretty good approximation of the
Mariscada in Green Sauce that I inevitably order in Spanish
restaurants. Never found a recipe under that name.

Movie: The Tailor of Panama. Handsome movie, the Panama
scenes providing a very credible allure. However, the story line leaves
much to be desired: the corruption and indifference are easy enough to
follow, but the gullibility of the masters in London and Washington is
tough to swallow. When Bush took out Noriega, he at least was cleaning
up his own dirty laundry. B

I've made the Salmon dish a couple of times before: it's probably the
single most surefire amazing dish in my repertoire. The rice was a
revelation: bacon and chicken stock made it a sumptuous background
for the sharp flavors of the other dishes (pickled ginger, fermented
black beans, and cilantro on the salmon; fish sauce, palm sugar, and
tamarind on water chestnuts, shrimp, and chicken; chile, garlic, and
the whole Chinese repertoire melded with the eggplant). The ice cream
was a fitting finish: the first actual success I can report with the
new-fangled ice cream maker I bought last year. One of the very best
dinners I've ever made.

Added yet another saxophone record to the
Year 2000 list: Harry Allen, Plays
Ellington Songs. Allen is a mainstream swing player, with a big,
full sound and around-the-melody improvisational style that he gleaned
from Coleman Hawkins. I have a soft spot for this style, and have always
found Allen's records immensely enjoyable. (My favorite is the 1994
ballad album, Blue Skies). I've played this one reguarly,
and always found it immensely enjoyable, but have only slowly come to
recognize its distinctive genius.